我們喜歡的都柏林火鍋小店 – new video – our favorite (so far) hot pot in Dublin

For those who just want to see video featuring Sing’s Big Butt shot – click here.
I know, I use his cute Big Bottoms to get views, but sadly Sing doesn’t have a nice six-pack like Grace’s husband so I can only use his ‘Asian Kim Kardashian’ look.

Anyway, we should be talking about hot pot. As you might already noticed on my blog or our Facebook page – I never been a big hot pot fan. The whole room is steamy, my hair start to curl, the soup base is either tasteless or gives you a feeling of ‘The Next Day After Taco Bell‘. And of course, the time limit. I didn’t experience the time limit in America, but back in Asia every single time we tried ‘All you can eat’ hot pots, they always gave us a time limit. 90-120 minutes, depending on a spot. To make it funnier, the time started to count when they lit the fire (so you had to wait until the soup is boiling) and ALWAYS when we reached the time limit, they took away the whole pot with all the food left in.
I can understand the owners who didn’t want people to think it’s ‘All you can eat while seating here for the whole day’, but at least turn off the fire and let me finish – you know how long it takes for a fish ball to be perfectly cooked?

Now we moved to Ireland and the ‘Summer’ here is described as a day with 17C (~63F) without a rain. So maybe like 10 days in total. Because of that I started to appreciate the concept of hot pot more. I even found a tomato soup base that perfectly suits me. It’s still steamy like in sauna, but I don’t care anymore – not with that kind of weather.

Usually, making hot pot at home should be cheaper, but with a small Asian community the prices of Asian products are pretty high. To help you realize how small the community is, let me tell you this. In the capital of Ireland, Chinatown has one or two real Taiwanese milk tea boba places. TWO. ONE, TWO. Freaking Chinatown.
The whole district is small, of course you can find lots of Thai food, Chinese takeaway, sushi all over the town, but it’s all a lucky shot. You need to base on your research or comments from people living in Dublin.
We go there really occasionally, so whatever we try is just a coincidence and faith that God or whoever there is, doesn’t hate us so much to give us diarrhea the next day.

The same way we found an ‘All you can eat’ hot pot & BBQ spot that I want to show you!

Han Yang103 Parnell streetDublin 1, Ireland

It’s located next to another Hot Pot & BBQ spot Lao, but the price of ‘All you can eat’ Hot pot is slightly cheaper (15.99 Euro for Han Yang and 16.99 Euro for Lao), moreover also includes a soft drink with free refill. Both of the places have also a Karaoke clubso if you think that today you can become next Eason Chan for 60 Euro you can give it a shot. Personally, I haven’t tried it, but I’ve seen a lot of Koreans coming to there just for the karaoke and I read the machines are mostly in Korean, has some Japanese songs, just English, Vietnamese or Chinese. I think if you’re interested in Karaoke itself Lao would be a better place, we’ve seen groups of Irish people having a party there so I assume their choice of the songs is bigger.

But why we chose Han Yang over Lao? There are few reasons.

The price. 2 euro seems like a pocket change, but since we drive all the way from Limerick we have to count gas price on the top.

The atmosphere. Leo Hot Pot & BBQ looks more modern, darker, cool, but I’m old fashioned. I like that ‘Grandma style’, it makes me think of those local small stores Sing and I used to go together.

Sauces. I love sesame paste and for me that the only sauce I need, but Sing is picky and still tries to make a perfect sauce. So he takes sesame paste, soy sauce with chilies and garlic, beef sauce and adds his own stuff. It’s pretty cool, in America I could only get already made sauce.

Self service. Call me weird, but I love the interaction with the food. I have fun picking what I want to put into my pot, how much I want to take.

Choice of the food. There’s a huge variety of seafood, which would suit people like Momzilla. Maybe the choice of the veggies could be big bigger, but if you’re a vegetarian you should go back home full anyway.

Friendly staff. No one rushes us, we are always asked about the refill (not like some of the places, where they ask if you need something right when you want to go out), they pay attention if there’s enough water in the pot.

Refilling with soup base, not water. So you can keep the taste! It’s the first place I went to that did this.

I talked about pros, but it’s time to mention few cons.

No rice included.Rice never bothered me anyway *cape flies away*. But it surely does bother Sing the rice eater. There’s some sort of Asian bread and Korean style rice cakes but for a Cantonese man a meal without rice is not a meal.

Soup base flavors. We ordered 老火靚湯養顏鍋 (Beauty Herbal Pot) and 鮮味生蠔鍋 (Seafood Oyster Pot) – aside of the fact I don’t feel any more beautiful 😉 the taste was pretty similar, the difference was only in ginger. We didn’t take a spicy version, because we thought the bases would be quite different, but in the end I couldn’t really tell the difference in taste.

Probably, there actually is a better hot pot, with better price or better ingredients but until we can find it, Han Yang is our top choice in Dublin.

Do you like hot pot? Do you have your favorite spot? Let us know your tricks to make it even tastier, maybe some sauce recipe? Let us know! 🙂

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hot pot is very common here in lovely china. it is a regularly choosen meal format for social gatherings…. in fact i really do not like it. often the hygiene of the restaurants is bad, the fond base has problems and on the next day there will be a stomach issue. therefor i honestly have to say i refuse hot pot where ever i can .. or cook it at home..

it reminds me, my mother in law (a.k.a. Momzilla) got sick when we went to hot pot in Guangzhou, luckily in HK we haven’t had that problem, hopefully I don’t jix it right now haha 🙂
I hope you at least have good hot pot at home 🙂

So cheap! In Finland hot pot usually costs like 30-40euros! Here in Germany we never went so I can’t say anything about the prices.
In China we sometimes go for hot pot but most of the times I don’t like it as most people with us order things like pig brain or cow stomach or fish heads…
But yeah, I also clicked on the video to see the Asian Kim kardashian 😀

Sadly, I have never had hot pot (I know, I need to get out more) but when I get to Dublin I’ll check it out. 😉 Funny post, I belly laughed when I read “whatever we try is just a coincidence and faith that God or whoever there is, doesn’t hate us so much to give us diarrhea the next day.”

Looks very nice, and after I watched your video I am craving for Hot Pot again. I’ll ask Mr. Panda if we can go get some on Friday or so :9
I only know of two restaurants in Vienna where you can get Hot Pot, one is well known and expensive (20€~ for 1 small plate of meat), the other one looks a little bit rundown but is cheap (~16€ per person all you can eat fry plate + hot pot) and much tastier. I go only with the sauces provided by the restaurant, but last time a friend I went with mixed her own sauce out of sesame sauce, soy sauce, coriander, chili, salt and sugar. I couldn’t bring myself to taste it, but it must have been delicious as she and her husband ate the whole bowl with their meat.
When I make hot pot at home, or noodle soup in general, I always use Japanese miso as soup stock as both of us like the taste a lot and it is fast, easy and cheap to make.

Wow! The food looks really nice. For 15 Euro, the price is reasonable. You are likely to pay more in Hong Kong for food like that.

Personally, I prefer the chicken pot hotpot, which is essentially chicken casserole. When you are done, you use the soup for hotpot. They are very tasty, but not for summer. (18 oC is still too hot for me for hotpot)

PS. Very well done on your video, it looks very professional. I also like your cooking video too! 🙂

I will have to try it once, but it might be difficult, knowing how much Sing loves chicken soup and he wouldn’t want to waste any of it since he never eats the soup base of hot pot therefore some of the broth would have to go down the drain haha 🙂
thank you so much! I’m trying my best! I’m so happy to hear that!

In Hong Kong, there aren’t many places that offer the chicken hotpots, maybe a few independent restaurants. One of my personal favourite is in Tai Wai and I recommend you to go when you visit HK next. They make the chicken soup from scratch and they will top up chicken soup for you when the soup is running low. Very good service and extremely friendly owner. My favourite is the coconut chicken hotpot. It is very flavoursome (http://www.openrice.com/zh/hongkong/restaurant/%E5%A4%A7%E5%9C%8D-%E8%96%AA%E5%91%B3%E5%9D%8A/186182)

I guess you can make chicken hotpot yourselves at home (just use the chicken meat and bones leftover from roast dinner and add veg, cream to thicken – or you can get different inspirations from BBC Good Food webpage), then throw in anything you like for hotpot!

I will make a video consisting just shots of Kim’s, I mean Sing’s butt 😀 he sadly noticed I was filming his butt instead of the meat 😀
I think if you go in a big group like 8 or more it’s not too pricey but if only Sing and I would be going… never, I wait for our trip to Macau, meeting my male bridesmaid who is a karaoke expert (tip: at the end of karaoke, if they have it chose a compilation of I think Eason Chan’s songs – it lasts 10 minutes so you get few more minutes of fun 😀 #cheaphusbandwithhischeapkaraokemasterfriend 😀

I had never tried hot pot before coming to China but now I love it. Someone upstairs commented on being stomach sick the day after hot pot, well that has never happened to me 🙂 My stomach is more than used to Chinese bacterias, hahaha.

I love having hotpot any time of the year, and especially in restaurants with unique soup base flavours. I too will get an upset stomach once in a while but I find it a result of self negligence sometimes (^_^;), with raw meat etc. Nowadays I’ll volunteer to oversee what goes in and out of the pot because I lack the iron gut that some of my friends do.

Hello, I love hotpot too ! I wish we have all you can eat hotpot here in Paris ! The last all you can eat hotpot that I had was in Taiwan ! After eating all the meats and vegetables we found out that the desert were all you can eat too ! And there were Haggendazs!
Thank you for reminding me good memories hehe